The Nun II review: Creature of habit is back for more

When the habit-wearing demon of the title actually shows up onscreen, The Nun II briefly becomes entertaining, if not quite coherent, as her power set appears near-infinite. Hitching a ride across Europe inside the body of a French groundskeeper named Maurice (a returning Jonas Bloquet), she’s by no means corporeally confined, breaking free with some regularity to strangle children and set priests on fire, while sending scary visions across hundreds of miles to her returning arch-nemesis, Sister Irene (Taissa Farmiga).

That might make the movie sound a lot more fun than it is, so let’s be clear: Valak the evil nun from Hell (Bonnie Aarons) doesn’t actually get much screen time. Serving a stupendously misguided story structure, the script keeps her and Irene separate for two thirds of the movie—Demián Bichir’s Father Burke died on the way back to his home planet of cholera between films—forcing us to spend time with young students we don’t really care about at a girls’ school, and to watch Irene’s bonding with colleague Sister Debra (Storm Reid), whose key character trait is she can’t literally believe the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. The plot, of course, will ultimately hinge upon this exact point.

There’s nothing wrong with introducing irritatingly bland characters in a horror sequel, so long as they die. Unfortunately, the body count stays relatively low, with Valak’s standards for who gets murdered—and who just gets messed with—entirely inconsistent. Conjuring franchise veteran Michael Chaves (The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It, The Curse Of La Llorona) can’t seem to decide if he’s making elevated horror, where you can get away with just scaring people, or exploitation cinema, where the kills are a big part of the appeal. Spoiler: it ought to be the latter, though he doesn’t know it or lean into it enough to make silly touches like a demonic goat man charging down a hallway on all fours into anything but unintended camp.

In one particularly odd attempt at a scare, Sister Irene is terrified by a magazine stand, where the pages start to flutter on their own. Assuming this film is aimed at least somewhat at older teens, their reaction may well be something more akin to, “What’s a magazine stand?” than, “Will those pages eventually form a mildly scary collage of a nun?” (Duh.) Screenwriter Akela Cooper usually understands the right trashy tone to take with this stuff, having previously given us Malignant and M3GAN, so she must not have had anything close to a final say here.